“Everything we build in New York, fails”, heard it 3 times at the event. Rad.
If we want Protei, or any other intentionally meaningful technology to impact the life of the People, it’s got to scale, according to Erica Kochi and Christopher Fabian of UNICEF Innovation. Want to see more of them, or how these principles work? Here. Captured at Unreasonable At State, 2013 05 03 in Washington DC.
Build for your user: Simple and cheap
Technology is just 5% of the solution
Things given get lost, things own stay with people
Design for Scale
Create sustainable system
Build Open and Adaptable
High-Level decisions are not made on precision of information
There are some moments that are too beautifully strange to be described with words.
Snapshot. It is 3 AM and I am playing basketball alone on top of one of the world fastest and most hygienic boat in the world, cruising speed between San Diego California and Ensenada in Baja California, Mexico.
Screenshot. My name is Cesar Harada, 29, I am an Unreasonable at Sea Entrepreneur. With my colleague Gabriella Levine, we got on board of the MV Explorer, for a 106 days sailing journey around the world with 10 other entrepreneurs that want to change the world, 20 world class mentors, 50 scholars, 600 american students to sail across 14 countries.
Thanks for joining the voyage! I will do my best to document the journey and share with you this privileged experience. This trip will be translated in several languages, thanks to a magnificent crew of volunteers translators : Thank you! We have just boarded, and we haven’t started to work yet. I will explain discussions, people, places, work as it develops over the next few days. The last days have been intense, and “now” feels more surreal than ever before. To understand bit more what’s happening, let’s rewind the last 72 hours :
Vancouver – Los Angeles – San Diego. A few hour ago, I was in the sky, in the narrow cabin of a 4 seat wide plane, flying above mega cities, distracted inspecting my wound.
A few hours earlier, I injured myself quite badly. As I brought a large wooden box for FedEx, I was asked – very last minute – to reduce the size of the wood crate I had just made. Working with a new and sharp wood saw just outside of FedEx in the dark and cold streets of Vancouver Canada, I simply butchered myself. In my bad luck, I am always the luckiest : the husband of my girlfriend’s best friend is a doctor, he decorated me with 8 pretty stitches above my left hand thumb tendons.
This is the box, containing 3 – in progress- prototypes of Protei, the Open Hardware Shape Shifting Sailing Robot. Too big to travel with me, the box is being transported to Hilo Hawaii where we will pick it up in a few days as we cross the Pacific Ocean.
We will use these prototypes to demo our technology. At sea for the next few months we will be developing both the technology and the business strategy for Protei technology.
It is now 5 AM, everyone is asleep, everything is vibrating as our 1000 passengers boat gently rolls. I am sitting in the cantine of the ship, our vessel is moving fast, cutting steadily through the steamy waters. This is the beginning of an amazing journey. Sore eyes, and brutal expectations.
I made these images to Promote Protei world tour with the Unreasonable at Sea :)
January to April 2013, Protei will sail all around the world and show up in these places. 2013 is going to be more than amazing for Protei and the Ocean.
I made those images to be part of our sponsorship proposal (download here 8Mb). We are now looking for sponsors for Protei for 2013.
You can see and comment our version 20121106 here : http://personal.crocodoc.com/pQk0oIB
If you know someone, or a some big companies that could become Protei’s sponsors – please tell me, or even better, introduce me : contact@protei.org
Thanks!
Behavioural Programming: Guiding people to form 1) Line, 2) Mesh, 3) Fully connected, 4) form groups.
Visual Programming: Asking a group of connected individuals to conform to prescribed geometrical figures.
Numerical Programming: Giving each single individual a set of simple instructions to apply regardless of other dynamics, and let these “naturally” interact.
Entropy: After having conducted these previous experiments, giving participants the instruction to do whatever they want with the string.
I have also updated the instruction set of instructions for the “Behavioural programming” here :
Warm up
Walk random patterns eyes open
Run random patterns with eyes open
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, stand up on one leg
Stand up on one leg, close one eye. Close the second eye.
Spin in one direction until you get dizzy.
Spin the other direction until you cancel the dizziness.
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Linear Network (Line)
_ I pull one line and connect everybody.
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Mesh Network (Mesh)
_ I cut the line, disconnecting some, reconnecting others in a mesh.
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Fully Connected Network (Fully Connected)
_ I each and everyone.
Walk random patterns eyes closed
Run random patterns with eyes closed
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Stand up still eyes open, look at others
Community building (Segregation)
How do you feel?
We went through 3 different types of network topologies :
1) a line network
2) a mesh network
3) a fully connected network
Which one did you prefer / dislike? Why?
What defines a community? Why?
Now I will get back to giving a few more instructions.
_ Pause.
Stand up still eyes closed, feel others
Feel others with the strings.
Which strings do you like most? Which string would you rather drop.
Keep the strings you like, drop the strings you don’t feel comfortable holding.
Eyes closed, keep holding the strings, but now move freely, wherever you want to go.
When you feel you are in the right place, stop. Take your time.
When I will see more than half of you standing still, this will be the end of this part of the experiment.
_ Pause.
How do you feel?
What did you learn?
What did we learn as a group?
How could push this experiment further?
I will continue this research further later – that was just a research note – and a cool poster coming out of it :) Original files here (.ai.pdf.jpg). Do you know of any interesting references / books / pdfs about network growth / evolution / topologies? Thanks!
World Environment Action (WEA)
The world leaders cannot agree, we need to take actions. We do 3 things :
1 – a global map conecting environmental reports to people taking action.
2 – a project managment interface
3 – a visual forum to imagine what the World Environment Organization (WEO) could be. Solving one problem at the time together. Take action!
Gabriella Levine and Cesar Harada have been selected to participate to the Unreasonable at sea for the Protei project.
Please watch the video above and you will understand why we are excited to be part of this great adventure. For several months on the sea, we will be in the company of some of the world most forward thinking entrepreneurs that will be our mentors. This is an immense honor for me and for the Protei Project and we will document this journey as well as possible to share this incredible privilege with the greatest number. You can see our dates of the travels and where we will stop on my time line.
That’s a silly video Gerard Rallo + Harry Vemeulen + Cesar Harada did back in 2009 at the Royal College of Arts – I just found it accidentally moments ago, and had a good laugh -again- :D
Royal College of Arts, London, UK. About 7 people.
Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. About 10 people.
CCCB, Barcelona, Spain. About 35 people.
In the last years I have been exploring the relation between social networks and architecture. Or how we can embody social networks to understand them better, and why not generate a new type of architecture that would live through these changes and improve human interactions. I conducted these groups experiments
Workshop on “Environmental Governance,” Design & Environment, Goldsmiths University, London UK.
And I am looking for new groups of people interested in exploring this in different cultural contexts.
History
The fact is that the therm social Geometry has been in used since 1976 by the American Prof. of Social Science Donald Black in the book “The Behavior of Law”. A well written and concise wikipedia article presents the matter. Some attribute the origins of Social Geometry to the works of Georg Simmel , Emile Durkheim or Pierre Bourdieu. However D. Black approach seems to take into account clear variables that are “usable” more directly in the generation of physical social networks :
horizontal/morphological (the extent and frequency of interaction among participants)
vertical (the unequal distribution of resources)
corporate (the degree of organization, or of integration of individuals into organizations)
cultural (the amount and frequency of symbolic expressions)
Black refers to this multi-dimensional amalgam as “social space“. My personal interest is to temporarily dissolve these “social controllers” and let them re-emerge and reconfigure in large-scale choreographic experiments, in the form of ephemeral architecture, that I call “Architecture of Play.
In the illustration above, you can see different stages to the generation of a social network :
randomly moving disconnected individuals
Linear network : one line connecting all actors.
Branched Network
Complex Network
Voronoi Cells
Arches
Membranes
And as constructed model :
Essentially we’re doing the same thing as the video above, Delauney triangulation : http://youtu.be/GUnuSYUXpwo
A simple set of instruction to generate complex behaviors and networks
These were the simple choreographic instructions I would give to the group. Updated instructions here.
The study of network topology recognises eight basic topologies:[5]
Point-to-point
Bus
Star
Ring or circular
Mesh
Tree
Hybrid
Daisy chain
But every single topology can be arranged in a way that tells a totally different story in the context of human architecture.
Complexity, Function & Play
Needless is to say that networks are not formed arbitrarily.
The exemple below is a neural network. On the left : INPUTS, on the right : a single OUTPUT.
Where more complex networks might provide multiple answers simultaneously :
And this is an network of human contributors to a wikipedia article : many to one.
This is the physical reality of our information network, the internet:
And this how the internet sees itself, as data nodes:
In fact the best resource I found to be up to date about visualisation of complex network is visualcomplexity.com
Formation, growth, Reconfiguration, Resilience and Decay
Based on the 7 basic network topologies, I made some sketches of network growth. Really rough at this stage :
English
Español
Deutsch
Français
Ελληνικα
日本語
한국어
Nederlands
polski
Português
Türkçe
Vietnamese
简体中文
繁體中文